Nancy Buirski, Award-Winning Documentary Filmmaker, Dies at 78

Nancy Buirski, an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker whose eye was honed as a nonetheless photographer and film editor, died on Wednesday at her residence in Manhattan. She was 78.

The trigger had not but been decided, her sister and solely rapid survivor, Judith Cohen, stated.

After founding the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in 1998 at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and directing it for a decade, Ms. Buirski (pronounced BURR-skee) made her personal first documentary, “The Loving Story,” in 2011.

The movie explored the case of Mildred and Richard Loving, who confronted imprisonment as a result of their interracial marriage in 1958 was unlawful in Virginia. (She was part-Black and part-Native American, and he was white.)

Their problem to the regulation resulted in a landmark civil rights ruling by the United States Supreme Court in 1967 that voided state anti-miscegenation legal guidelines.

The documentary, directed by Ms. Buirski, received an Emmy for excellent historic programming, lengthy kind, and a Peabody Award. It premiered on the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and made its tv debut on HBO throughout Black History Month in 2012.

“Drawing from a wealth of stunning archival footage,” Dave Itzkoff wrote in The New York Times. “‘The Loving Story’ recreates a seminal moment in history in uncommon style, anchoring a timely message of marriage equality in a personal, human love story.”

Ms. Buirski went on to hunt extra tales to inform, drawing on a variety of voices and experiences.

“Nancy was a completely original thinker and a visionary,” her frequent collaborator and producer, Susan Margolin, stated in an e-mail. “With every film she pushed the limits of the art form with her kaleidoscopic, unique approach to storytelling.”

Ms. Buirski directed, co-produced and wrote “Afternoon of a Faun” (2013), concerning the ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, who contracted polio whereas on tour in 1956; and “By Sidney Lumet” (2015), concerning the acclaimed filmmaker, each of which have been broadcast by PBS on “American Masters.”

She additionally directed, co-produced and wrote “The Rape of Recy Taylor” (2017), concerning the 1944 kidnapping of a Black girl by seven white males. Despite their confessions, they have been by no means charged, though in 2011 the Alabama Legislature apologized for the state’s failure to prosecute her attackers.

The critic Roger Ebert known as the movie “a stiffing, infuriating marvel,” and it was awarded a human rights prize on the 74th Venice International Film Festival.

Ms. Buirski went on to direct, co-produce and write “A Crime on the Bayou” (2021) a couple of 1966 altercation sparked by college integration, and “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy” (2023), which explores John Schlesinger’s 1969 movie starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman.

She was additionally a particular adviser to “Summer of Soul” (2021), Questlove’s Academy Award-winning concert-film documentary, based mostly on rediscovered footage, concerning the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.

Years earlier, as an image editor on the worldwide desk at The New York Times, Ms. Buirski was credited with selecting the picture that received the newspaper its first Pulitzer Prize for pictures, in 1994.

After looking for {a photograph} to accompany an article on conflict and famine in southern Sudan, she select one by Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist, of an emaciated toddler collapsing on the way in which to a United Nations feeding middle as a covetous vulture lurked within the background.

Ms. Buirski counseled the picture to Nancy Lee, The Times’ image editor on the time. She then proposed it, strongly, for the entrance web page, as a result of, she recalled telling one other editor, “This is going to win the paper’s first-ever Pulitzer Prize for photography.”

The {photograph} ended up showing on an inside web page within the concern of March 26, 1993, however the response from readers, involved concerning the baby’s destiny, was so sturdy that The Times printed an uncommon editors’ observe afterward explaining that the kid had continued to the feeding middle after Mr. Carter chased away the vulture.

The image received the Pulitzer within the characteristic pictures class. (Mr. Carter died by suicide a couple of months later at 33.)

Ms. Buirski was born Nancy Florence Cohen on June 24, 1945, in Manhattan to Daniel and Helen (Hochstein) Cohen. Her father was a paper producer.

After graduating from New Rochelle High School in Westchester County, she earned a bachelor’s diploma from Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y., in 1967.

She labored as an editor for the Magnum picture company earlier than becoming a member of The Times.

As a photographer she produced a e book of 150 photos titled “Earth Angels: Migrant Children in America” (1994), which vividly captured the kids of migrant farmworkers at work throughout the day and attending college at night time and dramatized the hazards they confronted from poor housing, harsh working circumstances and publicity to pesticides.

Her marriages to Peter Buirski and Kenneth Friedlein led to divorce.